"Coming Out" as Consciousness, agenda politics and identity conflict

The Tim Cook coming out news brought out a banal comment on a Mac forum.


What you are, is truly beyond definition - but humanity 'plays the game' of definitions very very SERIOUSLY! So if who and what you truly feel you are - (or are NOT) - does not fit in the current CONSENSUAL dictate - then you have a 'path' in life of finding the willingness to accept and embrace what you truly align in as You, and let go of what you are not - without presuming to decide for anyone else. That's their life.

To open and join in real relationship is perhaps the richest and most rewarding aspect OF being human. Perhaps anything less than that, is not yet come into truly human cognisance. But relationship is also deeply challenging because fear comes up from within us in relating to others. Society operates the rituals of navigating and masking or mitigating such fear. Moving through fear uncovers a basis in which we are released of a deeply onerous burden of beliefs or self-definitions that effectively deny our joy in living. Yet most of us feed our fear with compound interest as if a greater indebtedness can become true wealth.

To me the issue of sexual orientation is not the point. The point is a life truly embraced and lived. By their fruits ye shall know them. (And they shall know themselves).
So rather than judge a book by its cover, I feel the qualities that someone brings forth as a presence and communication of life - or the presentation of attempting to pass off as genuine currency that simply isn't.

Gender politicking is something else. I generally feel such a movement is subverted, funded and directed by agendas that care less for people and more for the power interests of a few. As I do with health politics and climate politics - because politics itself has become corrupted.

I appreciated a recent HuffPo conversation opened by gay UKIP MEP David Coburn that touches on various issues - albeit in deliberately provocative terms.

One of the primary ways a deceptive or masked power operates is to make it almost impossible to talk or debate about it's real nature. So it can effectively become illegal or open to vilification to even talk about something in a way that challenges the official version.

In THAT sense I am willing to be 'politically incorrect'. But my interest is in reintegrating the warring polarities of a split personality, so as to be free to more gladly live and share and unfold the lives that we ARE blessed with - howsoever we might account for our circumstance.

Why is Tim Cooks 'coming out' placed in the 'technology section' of various 'news' media? Because are not NEWS media but operate an agenda that tends to align in negative common self interest of fearfully defended masked agenda pretending to be what they are not, in order to get something or to escape something.

Being - existence Itself - is the greatest gift anyone can receive or share in - for all else is OF that and in that. That awareness of existence expresses itself in infinitely rich diversity does not mean it is at war with itself. It simply means that each is true unto its own Movement.

When we are true to ourself we are no longer making choices or accepting self-beliefs that are not! And this has a very different perspective than self-judgement - or the projection of such hatred onto others.

Agenda:
A plan of things to be done or problems to be addressed.
The underlying intentions or motives of a particular person or group.

Gender:
 based on Latin genus 'birth, family, nation'. The earliest meanings were  'kind, sort, genus' and 'type or class of noun, etc.' (which was also a sense of Latin genus).

The 'doings' automatically generate from foundations of template or core definitions. These are NOT personality choices - but the choices that template the personality and its Life themes.

Any corruption or modification of the template must lead to corrupted outcomes. However the original file is 'read only' to users, though sudo embodies unified creative change at all levels simultaneously as 'behold I make all things new'.

So if an agenda seems to be operating that is out of true with who you feel and know yourself to be - then look to the copy of the template that is generating such experience.

If something seems to upset or offend me - why am I choosing to see it in such a way? What motive or payoff do I get from choosing to see it this way and does it make sense or belong as my choice when I see it clearly?
The very act of seeing truy is already the transformation occurred.
Once the snake on the carpet is revealed as a the dressing gown cord, one cant really believe the 'snake' again - but you can insist against your own knowing if you WANT to enough!

If you feel you have benefited from sharing such a consideration, you are welcome to buy me an iPhone 6 - though I would much prefer an ipad for reading on. ;-)
But I don't write for payment - its in the nature of a gift.

I pause and feel and consider issues that come up for me in a particular communication or situation - and take a journey that shares itself as an unfolding of willingness - for no one is persuaded or required to read or follow or accept anything that is not already their own choosing.

That last sentence in itself is a very powerful statement. If we are 'led' astray then in some sense at some level we choose it by where we choose to give our attention. Strangely, what we fear to look upon, always then seems to possess or direct us until we can look on it and look past it to what we love to alight in.

Upgrading the Operating System - computing the future?

I wrote this into my local Mac User group - but it felt worthy of a wider view and while initially referring to specific computing environment is a comment on our times - as well as chiming in with a recent news article on Time Berners-Lee and internet hate.

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The only hassle with 'trying out a new Mac OS' is in any changes effected in that system that then are lost or have to be redone or undone in reverting.

Having IMAP makes email independent of the process. But there are all kinds of potential problems that can occur or have to be kept track of. One thus has to become a master strategist in laying out a course of action - or perhaps just enjoy other things as a strategy of not opening a can of work unless there really is a concrete desire rather than a passing fad of curiosity.

When I moved up a couple of notches from Snow Leopard (Mac OS10.6) there were things I lost and things I gained and after a bit I got used to workflows without the one and took for granted the other. An underlying narrative of this is of the fading of the excitement around unfolding of emergent future of feature, significant speed ups and storage increases. But instead; a sense of an ever moving complexity that whilst seemingly simplified in a certain kind of interface is in fact a fragmenting and distracting influence to even try to keep up with.

So the general trend is to just use the particular app or function without really learning much in terms of exploring and expanding a knowledge base. In fact one just 'g++gles up' now for almost anything and earns a sort of work-around 'try this try that' mode of a navigational sense of what will likely work. And probably not bother to really understand what the problem was if it can now be worked round - because life-time is the one bit of the OS that cannot be 'upgraded' to a larger, or more powerful version.

Time spent in something enjoyable doesn't require anything else to justify itself.
The relationship of computing to time is perhaps founded on particular golden examples of 'saving immense amounts of time'. Typesetting > Copy and paste. Accounting ledgers > spreadsheets.

But there is something in the WAY of it that becomes a Faustian Pact, in which powers are added us that yet we become addicted and enslaved to or corrupted by. Oh I know this seems strong language - but the addict is the last to own their condition and the seduction of power flatters the self. I found myself writing that believing our own stories/lies is the basis of corruption - which is a loss of a clarity of perspective and appreciation often associated with humility and compassion.

When I first bought (and met) a computer I got a Mac primarily because I gained a clear intuitive sense that I would spend time IN a more enjoyable virtual environment. (I had no direct experience of computing before I bought one - having been a refusenik/luddite until then).

I felt a real appreciation of the programmers and developers and engineers that had created a human friendly interface that was NOT the imposition of a requirement to fit into a soul-less mechanism and at that time NOT operating as a coercive marketing platform/parlour. So I had a naturally good feeling for the Mac - and for Apple (the two were different).

Apple remade themselves via Jobs 2.0 and are not the same company.

One can make personal mythological play out of such corporations of service-framework or rival protocols, but just look at the hatred that comes up from such modes of identity in the public domain!

Tim Berners-lee wonders why there is such hatred online (recent news). It is all a matter of identity as invested in 'for and against' - instead of identity yielded in 'both and'.

Will humanity destroy its world/self? ...Perhaps.
But I see the basis from which it operates as a disintegrating 'platform' - and that means becoming free of its compulsions as a result of dissociation.

Metamorphosis operates in many cases as the growing of the new within the old with a process of emergence through the process of apparent death.
Parasites operate similarly but as an invading or consuming violation of the host rather than as the reintegration of the Life of the host into new form.

Maybe that's the nature of a choice - as to whether to operate upon wholeness in attempt to exploit it for an identity over and against others - or to operate within wholeness as a unique but integral facet of its nature.

Upgrading one's 'operating system' then serves a true integration of, rather than 'adding' to a limited and limiting code-base.

The consolidation of power-struggle in the world drives an inherently globalist agenda in which the very few dictate for their gratification upon the very many, but only an integrated appreciation of power can inherit the Earth as true life time shared.

One doesn't have to love or hate Apple to engage or assert one's relationship as a customer and a fellow human being to all those human beings in Apple or its associated communities, in making choices that grow a capacity for choice rather than give it away.

Computer interface, cultural values and conditioning?

I responded to Wired.com's article:
Why Apple (and You) Might Miss Scott Forstall
I see it as an opportunity to talk about the almost invisible layer of architecture and conditioning that communicates and inculcates cultural values - or indeed the lack thereof! So this isn't just about Mac - but a perspective on the extension of our mind - into virtual digital realities.


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Without making this a personality thing, I feel this article is missing the trend in computing that has largely abandoned an educated responsible user interface and opted for a dumber, entertaining, utility front end. There are all sorts of issues in this that are very worthy of discussion and acknowledgement but 'news' itself has also succumbed to the same template approach of dumbed and entertaining fodder.

Issues of control and communication are fundamental to a user interface.
There is a lot more at stake and involved than consumer edification in all of this for it is symptomatic of the prevailing culture or mentality of our times.
Computing has in a very short time, become a layer of both environment and an enabler and a lens of communication and function.
There are lots of things about the mind that are 'invisible' to those who simply 'use' or identify at the front end or surface. This is also true of the digital network - which is an extension of our lower mind.
I say lower because, the conscious qualities of a living presence - such as insight, discernment, recognition, honour and gratitude,  transcend and precede the programmed and programming mind.

We collectively have drifted into identifying ever more deeply with 'control mind' - and are losing the call and the culture of our truly Conscious being.
That which identifies control as safety, order and a self justified specialness of self, is blind to the truly Conscious and only sees it insofar as it can exploit it.
Meeting in shared purpose is very different from forcing outcomes. The quality of trust is extended and embodied.

Our architecture reflects our values - as does all that we embody. But it also inculcates those values as a subliminal conditioning.

Billions of us are spending a lot of time in this new 'environment' (regardless of the particular brand). I call for a conscious discernment as to the choices that collectively we are each and all making - because what we make tends to make us in its own image.

To sell a virtual world as a distraction for a desecration of our living relationship, (the Life), may provide meds against despair and chaos - but it takes another step away and ultimately only delays addressing and correcting the core issues that set up the experience of conflict, distrust, dissonance and dis-ease.

I was drawn to the Mac in the 90s in part because I felt a machine being fitted to Man rather than man being fitted to the machine. And in a way that made the machine more 'human-friendly' and creatively fun and less clunky, ugly and conformed to corporate business edicts. But that core principle was abandoned with Mac OSX - or at least adulterated and compromised to a marketing mentality. (And there are historical reasons which account for why).

The blindness leading up to the financial collapse is as nothing to the blindness of our passive acceptance of the cultural developments of our time. It is not as a conspiracy theorist or doomsdayer that I write - but simply in witness for a Conscious appreciation of the Life that we share (whether we like it or know it or not), and in a desire to wake up (from a dead end) to a life more abundant.

Its not just a product, its not just an operating system. It is mind expressing itself - consciously or unconsciously; wisely or chaotically.
Much that seems wise for the short term reaps a bitter harvest. We have to do more than think-react. (Or should I say less? Yes we have to calm down a bit, connect with our being and feel more).

The future of the Net?

An FT article of an interview with Tim Berners-Lee prompted this somewhat drafted article on the underlying human issues that are expressing in the rapidly developing Net - in its larger sense of digitally connected infrastructure. In attending the symptoms we miss the causes. Yet the forms ARE giving feedback to the Movement that is current - not only of the world - but of our personal participation as a subscriber and investor in such a world.

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To be fair, Facebook requires membership for access whereas Apple do not - as yet - lock anyone into their App Store. It remains an option. The 'lock-in' of Apple is the 'ecosystem of hardware and software that are both essentially under their control for better and for worse.

The open technology approach serves those of good will but falls down with regard for security against abuse and corruptions - as well as the issues of fragmentation into ever more complex variations. A position of control can implement protections and a degree of stability but the trust of being served and protected that is extended by members of that system can itself be neglected and abused - and usually is!

These are inherent human problems or aspects of a conflicted mentality and the root issues lie beneath technological expressions of their symptoms in the very dynamic of what we tend to simply accept as 'our mind' or indeed the human condition - which might be better called the human conditioning.

Integrity and trust, are fundamental to true sanity and communication, privacy and control tend to effect a private intent to dominate without checks of accountability or transparency. Reaction or resistance to being controlled can itself set itself up as the very thing it hates. There is a call for honest and open discernment and communication that can own our own investments and opinions without polarising against different interests.

It seems that Corporate forces drive the development of the Net, as with most else, and that the care for the integrity of the whole is only active when those interests are threatened. This is 'market forces', which is another name for war - albeit mostly managed without bloodshed - on the surface at least.

The appetite for virtual identity - on or offline - is deeply embedded in our human psyche, and drives the development of business that serves and also exploits its desires and fears.
The impulse toward honesty or congruency of being is apparently small and seemingly ineffectual - excepting to be used as a face of self justification or when asserting 'moral high ground' in a perceived conflict.

But the disintegration of a global system or indeed the corruption of the basis of the system itself, is of such an order of magnitude that it calls to mind Lewis Carroll:

Tweedledum and Tweedledee
Agreed to have a battle;
For Tweedledum said Tweedledee
Had spoiled his nice new rattle.

Just then flew down a monstrous crow,
As black as a tar-barrel;
Which frightened both the heroes so,
They quite forgot their quarrel

To my mind the fictional characters are aspects of one mind playing out conflicting parts and enjoying the struggle. But the monstrous crow represents an order of fear and undoing such that the competitive urge to prevail can be subsumed to a willingness to serve the whole. That is to discern and trust a unified Consciousness.

To serve the whole could also be likened to the willingness of the Prodigal son's return to True Source. In the expression of this is the 'restoration of abundance and union'.

The attempt to control by imposition of power over, will in my view lead to collapse or disintegration. This is being fleshed out on a Big Canvas - and so becomes an opportunity to awaken to an entirely fresh perspective.

At times of crisis, matters that have been denied are forced into the open, and nothing can remain as it was (believed and experienced to have been). Amidst fundamental change, a fundamental trust may be regained).

If every digital event was available to being searched and found - but that such search itself was no less open, then would we attend to our legitimate business and only seek out that which we have a need or business to know - and then openly - because furtively is not available?
Would we have to be willing to be seen to be watching pornography by those who are willing to be seen to make it their business to know - and of whom all else about them was visible?

This scenario reminds me of a sense of another level of existence - if you will permit me to put it so - where every thought has immediate effect and no thought is hidden. What then would you create? It is clear that what we can think has no limit apart form the limits that our own thought sets on itself.

Our technology is bringing us to an underlying truth of which we have successfully forgotten for a very long time. The notional entity of person, nation or corporation, is in fact an expression of an interdependence in which the self is largely a virtual construct overlay upon an actual Movement that is not really ours to control so much as to embody and share.

Yet the struggle of 'virtual and notional' allegiances and identities persists even as the ground is moving out from under them.

I don't pretend to understand what is going on in the usual sense of the word, but I do feel that there are perspectives beyond those masks and identities to which we have fitted - and I write as an invitation to be innocently curious rather than defined.

Actual service and notional war

On Bloomberg News, the article:
Samsung Chips Said to Be Kept From New IPhone on Pricing,
might read as a spat between two giant tech corporations - among many such spats in a rapidly evolving scenario of gadgetry that uses and becomes a sort of externalized neural network - whose nature and purpose is as divided and conflicting as our own minds; communication and sharing vs ownership and control.

I commented the writing below because I see these patterns and would raise them to awareness - and to a conscious participation in all that life is - rather than an unconscious entanglement in what we wish or demand it to be.

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This kind of thing speaks of the modern world; where the actual economy is an inter-penetrating interdependence of mutual service and function, but the notional entities are still trying to run as independent identities - whether they be corporations, nations or indeed, persons.

The culture of manipulating a private gain rather than embodying genuine desire for value shared has made war out of relationships of the parts.

Now it might be said that such war is the evolutionary process of arriving at and abiding in What Works and yet that is merely confirming one's starting place of asserting a private gain at expense of others as 'what works'.

It is true that attempts to use power lead to brokering alliances of mutual limitation and cooperation, but these are only held to conditional outcomes of personal advantage and not truly shared value - ie: not real relationships.

The only way of waking up to a different foundational perspective, is to be exposed and confronted in the experience of 'what doesn't work, cannot work and never could work'. This is addressing an orientation to our life rather than mechanical processes that substitute for life.

Survival seems unarguable as a goal, but what is the true nature and purpose of what is surviving? Fear and deception are usurpers of the process of communication and trust upon which all depends.

I realize I am talking of underlying thought and cultural presumptions in what at first glance seems just a shift in relations between two tech companies. But this perspective is where I meet the world in a sense of shared value; in shared purpose.

I don't know if corporate,national or even personal entities are capable of growing trust, because in some sense it is the subordination of the defended identity to a true process of communication that extends and inspires trust.

The exposure of the manipulations of a loveless and joyless intent, through experience of humiliation, cultivates a thirst for truth. Modern technical expertise and sophistication can provide the most subtle and convincing manipulations that are attuned to 'reading' and moulding our psyche. It's a kind of war on the mind in which the only 'way out' is to refuse to take the bait of reaction and to listen - to truly discern - in the heart.

This is simply what we are faced with moment by moment in any case - but reaction indulges the imaginative sense of specialness of self in vindication of a bunch of unobserved ideas that run like background programs.

I have a sense that truth will 'out' and that despite the appearances of war, an externalized mind is emerging - that has no intelligence but our own to extend and yet our own is as yet unawake to its true nature and runs as if an independent program.

Thanks for listening in.

Apple's latest ads, advertising in general and the fruit of a different Tree

(Comment after being invited to comment regarding the latest ads from Apple - see link in title above)

The 'message' is that you can do things with a Mac very simply (once you know how), and using software that is included with the Mac - which is not just up-market hardware but the only (practical) hardware you can run Mac OSX on. For a Mac is unified software/hardware and not just the box.

In order to 'get attention and hold it, the adverts are trying to use humour, and putting out the 'genius' idea that indicates a support network for the new user. Many new users demographically believe that they are an idiot as far as computers go - or rather that they are clueless regarding the use of such technology.

In order to appeal to one market, Apple inevitably invite derision from those who are relatively literate regarding the use of computers.

Advertising in general is not merely conveying information, but seeks to implant associations, in the minds of many and expresses manipulative intent. Because it is so 'normal' in our times we accept it as almost invisible - and yet it is a kind of warfare being waged.

The inviting via suggestion and insinuation of personal associations that promise a getting or enhancing one's identity from either adopting or hating a brand or product or range of services, is what all advertising tends to join in pushing. This is part of the insanity of our time. It is also reenacting the essential mythos of the apple in the Garden in the Bible story. By listening to a false voice, one seems to become made in one's own image - and exercising a 'freedom' of individual or personal judgement in which one is actually blinded to a true discernment of reality and infatuated with self image; the Prodigal error of an imaginative mind playing all by itself as if it was the thing it imagines.

It is the way of all scams, that they sucker those who seek something 'too good to be true' or that promise more than can actually ever be delivered. The mind that wants to believe its own stories, is manipulatable.

The mentality, and its resultant culture that it embodies, is what is really going on. To see past the deceptions, one has to eat of a different Tree!

It is usually the way that the mentality of the 'top dog' becomes inflated, paranoid and out of touch. 'What is good for me is good for the whole". Such self serving mentality can only call for a fall! But in amongst the tares is a harvest of true service.

There is a process of externalising some aspects of our  'brain' or mind in Information Technology, and Apple are playing a significant role in this rapidly developing extension to our otherwise organic existence, not least in making a 'front end' or user experience, that can actually be used by a very larger portion of people (who otherwise demonstrate a range of resistance or fear regarding the adoption of new technology).

But in 'succeeding' at widespread adoption, There is a losing out to the 'market forces' that are essentially driven by surface desires and short term 'hits'. This cultivates dumb consumers as a sort of cattle for the 'clever' to prey on. That they are 'stupid' is a presumption that is therefore reinforced in EVERY advertisement or PR spin campaign.

It doesn't matter what tools we use so much as the conscious purpose that aligns them to serve the purpose in the heart. 'Identity' conflict is a sort of game that gets out of hand. But there is a great appetite in the human conditioning, for competition and the attempt to personally overcome adversity - hence the Olympic Games - in which all sorts of nonsense is concurrent with shining a spirit of excellence.

Apple, closed systems, power, responsibility, integrity and trust

(Reflections on a server glitch affecting the Apple's app system.


The benefits of a centrally controlled system are many, but the risks are great, and the responsibility of the caretakers of that system is greater still. True power must embody responsibility to be legitimately used. It (apple's offering) isn't just a product - when it is inherently dependent to the system that comes with it. This glitch is a temporary thing quickly remedied - but it brings up wider issues - for me at least!

With the resources that Apple has, it can anticipate and correct many socio-political and technical issues that can and will undermine its integrity as a service.

Corporate power has to awaken from ego-land and actively serve the environment that sustains and feeds it - rather than exploit and manipulate everything to maximal self advantage (but toxic to the Whole).

I don't mean some idealistic presentation so much as grounded practical culture of starting out from the optimum perspective available.

The apple of the tree of knowledge of good and evil is symbolic of a separate self interest acted out in mutuality. (Private self interest hidden behind figmented presentations of self justification).

The apple of the tree of Life is not truly lost - excepting to a continued wish to have one's own thinking prevail over truth shared. Its a matter of where one lives out From.

Integrity and trust are fundamental to all else. When the illusion of self-power is revealed as such, the awakening is to true service.

If closed systems are revealed as just another attempt to prevail over life - then they have to be abandoned.

Life demands a process of trust and communication amidst what often feels chaotic and threatening. To extend trust and communicate with integrity - one has to have uncovered it in oneself. This is the fruit of the Tree of Life - and not a matter of PR presentation.

Do we believe our own hype when we are at the top of our game? We tend to. But the pace of change now is a steep upward slope on the graph - and while it is still possible to call for awakened responsibility, I feel to do so.

Why the iPad is a waste of time

To an attention seeking article on the cusp of Apple news

Disingeneous promotion here!

A waste of time is time given to a purpose that is not your heart's true desire.
That we can waste time is evident because we can become infatuated with and indeed devote ourselves to or become mesmerised by that which we do not really want.

Those who have a clear sense of value and purpose - however that is expressed, are less liable to be seduced and manipulated by distraction.
The culture of modern media and consumption makes war upon our mind in attempt to win and manipulate and keep our attention - but it only only finds our attention where we are willing to give it.

The purpose we hold consciously in our Heart is the guide and protector of our day. The mind can wander - but in anyone Conscious, this will set off an alarm of dissonance, by which we pause, check in, and realign with our true desire.

'Ten thousand apps' was a reason not to get involved! But amidst any complexity or overflow of information, is called forth discernment in sorting and navigating what is actually relevant. (I didn't say productive).

There are many who want to get lost in distraction, because it allays a deeper dissonant sense of being out of true and the feelings of powerlessness or wrongness that are associated there. But such strategy is delay amidst suffering - albeit in disguise.

The joys of life are indeed joyful - and all the more lovely for being embraced without attempt to feed or validate self image.

Time can waste as well as being wasted. Have the time of our lives - not by cramming stimulation - but by relaxing into the moment that Is.

Thinking is the original virtual reality, and robs us of the glory - (the light of beauty) of our being. yet we are all mostly addicted to it as if it was our real self and not a virtual avatar experience we play out in form.

The issues of trust, privacy and control are brought out in our new technology. No one knows how this thing is working out but that it is bringing us to a place where deeply buried issues will be inescapably in our Face.

Thanks for your attention.